And Chipotle ranks among the top chain restaurants for L.A. County inspection scores, as I learned from my previous analysis!

So even having inspection scores and violation details published by the government health inspectors and that information showing up next to restaurant reviews still may not be enough to cause restaurants to give proper attention to food safety. About the only thing that seems to get their attention is the negative impact on their stock prices when word gets out about customers getting sick. Here is Chipotle’s share price chart from earlier today.

The health inspectors weren’t the first to know of the customer complaints. Even if the restaurant had known about the complaints, they didn’t take the necessary precaution of closing the store and sanitizing it until after so many customers reported getting sick on the crowdsourced restaurant information website IWasPoisoned.com.

If more of the inspecting agencies published their data in LIVES format, which would make it such that Yelp users could easily see the tarnished ratings, perhaps the restaurant operators would pay closer attention to food safety. But it won’t be the inspecting agencies pushing for this transparency. A Minneapolis inspector asserts that sharing inspection data results in resources wasted “fighting over the grade” with the restaurant operators rather than actually improving food safety. So we won‘t know if Yelp’s restaurant grade experiment can reach its potential to provide a benefit to the public primarily because of a lack of voluntary participation by the inspecting agencies, but also because those inspections have limited value when even poor results get the highest grade.

Perhaps a crowdsourced feedback approach like IWasPoisoned.com is more effective anyway.